How are you approaching job descriptions? Do you thaw out previous versions and push them into the job portals while hoping for the best? Or do you try to craft them based on the people doing the job today or the gaps you are trying to fill? These job descriptions are the billboards you are hanging out to sell your company to people in the market for a job. Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, writing in the October Harvard Business Review, says that those traditional approaches to job descriptions “…can’t keep up with the rate of change in real roles in today’s organizations.”

He makes the point that tasks are changing so fast in many companies that the job description can become a point of contention. If you hire an employee based on a job description focused on customer service tasks or prepress tasks, but due to automation, new equipment, or other changes in the business, you want to redeploy them, they might come back to your carefully crafted job description to say it wasn’t what they were hired to do! Even if they have the skills and vision, they may fight you on a change. The takeaway is that job descriptions have a sell-by date that isn’t always obvious.

The three suggestions from Nieto-Rodriguez are to use role descriptions that are outcome-, skills-, and team-focused. To draw a box around the concept, consider the difference between a description for a sales role that specifies how many contacts someone should make versus a results-based one that says the role is responsible for increasing sales or improving customer retention by a defined percentage. The same idea works for customer service jobs by changing the focus from how many calls someone takes to how they handle interactions. A results-based description for a customer-facing role might specify that the goal for all interactions is that they are resolved and documented in under two hours.